Towering over a low-income area of Chicago, and wrapped in a speech that’s hard to decipher, this controversial monolith feels like a menacing sci-fi HQ. Is it a monument – or a mausoleum?

The Egyptians had their pyramids. The Anglo-Saxons had their barrows. And the Americans have their presidential libraries – the chief difference being that the leaders the US venerates are usually still alive at the opening.

Lacking a royal family or a state religion, the US presidency has swelled to fill the void, transforming over the decades into a national personality cult, complete with its own secular temples to these powerful men. The latest pharaonic edifice is about to open on Chicago’s south side, where it looms on the skyline as a towering totem to the 44th president, Barack Obama. He might have seemed humble in office, but in his post-presidential, Netflix-producing afterlife, Obama has erected the largest, costliest and most audacious complex of them all. Behold the $850m Obamalisk – or, as it sometimes feels morbidly like, the Obamausoleum.

Buzzy new thriller Backrooms takes us on an unknowable journey through liminal spaces, the latest film to turn a building into a horror villain

When architect turned furniture store owner Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) finds a portal to a mysterious realm of “backrooms” in the basement of his showroom, he struggles to explain it to his therapist, Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve).

“I found a place …”

Links between Trump Organization and Ivanishvili family for Tbilisi skyscraper raise new conflict of interest concerns

A Trump Tower planned for the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, is to be built on land currently part-owned by the son of the US-sanctioned leader of the country, according to official records.

The proposed skyscraper, a joint venture between a local consortium and the Trump Organization, which is managed by the US president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, will be on a plot whose current registered owner is the International Charity Fund Cartu.

From furniture with ‘skinny legs’ to making sure spaces work for multiple purposes, three experts who live in tiny homes share their best lessons

In 2010 Colin Chee picked up the keys to his 37 square metre off-the-plan apartment in Melbourne’s city centre. “It was only then that I realised how shit it was.”

With no design experience and a limited budget, his quest to find inspiration eventually led to the birth of Never Too Small, a YouTube channel showcasing clever designs for small spaces from around the world. Launched in 2017, it now has more than 3 million subscribers.

New exhibition opens the ‘file cabinet’ of the late actor’s mind, spotlighting self-made collages and iconic men’s suits

• ‘A photographer with a cool and deadly eye’: Diane Keaton’s creativity behind the lens

On a recent Friday afternoon, I stood before “the wall”: a sprawling collage created by Diane Keaton. The late actor pinned objects of fascination to this collage – including snaps of herself in Parisian photo booths, a fake ear with acupuncture points, mugshots of Victorian women, bingo cards, a menu from a defunct California gambling den and a photograph she took of her friend Carol Kane – over many decades.

The piece is one of Keaton’s many personal effects on view at Bonhams in West Hollywood before showing in New York later this month. Anna Hicks, the head of private and iconic collections at the auction house, tells me that this sizable piece, covering nearly an entire wall, constitutes a mere slice of the 8x30ft collage Keaton kept inside her Sullivan Canyon home. Bonhams specialists found even more ephemera, such as signed photos of her The Godfather co-star Al Pacino, tucked underneath this towering assemblage. “I think it tells you a lot about her,” Hicks says. “All her thoughts and different things that she found important or interesting, she just pinned up here.”

Glenn Murcutt pioneered architecture that was sensitive to its environment, and accomodating to changing temperatures and wildlife

The house teaches you things, Lynne Eastaway says. Today, a choir of cicadas fill the scrub with a rhythm that rises and falls. On other days, there may be visits from birds, goannas, echidnas, wombats, wallabies and kangaroos.

“The bush ends, and the house begins,” she says. “You’re not the centre; you’re just part of it. That’s the thing you learn.

From a converted art deco hotel in Glasgow to a brutalist apartment in London’s Barbican

The Ultimate Picture Palace opened in 1911 and is housed in a Grade II-listed building in need of renovation

The survival of one of the UK’s oldest independent cinemas is under threat while its landlord, the University of Oxford’s Oriel College, refuses to extend its lease to allow what its director says are vital renovations.

The Ultimate Picture Palace in east Oxford opened in 1911, and has entertained generations of students and residents, including the Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes. It sells tickets for its 106 seats through an old-fashioned box office window to patrons queueing on the street, and its screen is behind a manually opened curtain.

Ana Viladomiu has been a ‘privileged’ resident of the once derided, now revered Barcelona apartment building for almost 40 years

Imagine that you live in an enormous, beautiful apartment designed by one of the world’s most admired architects in the most expensive street in Spain and for which you pay a derisory rent, with the right to live there until you die.

Meet the writer Ana Viladomiu, 70, one of two remaining tenants of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà on the elegant Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. Although Ana Viladomiu is widely known and referred to in Spanish media as the last tenant of La Pedrera, there is in fact another resident who lives in the other half of the building, but as Viladomiu says, “we don’t share a lobby, elevator, or staircase; we only see each other when we take our dogs for walks”.

Simon White comes clean after finding clay pieces in toffee tin, saying he took them as souvenir from Wenlock Priory

Fragments of a priory’s medieval tiled floor that spent almost 60 years stashed in a toffee tin after being pocketed by a nine-year-old boy during a family outing have finally been handed back.

The three pieces of decorative clay tiles, dating from the late 13th to early 14th century, were taken as a souvenir by Simon White during a family visit to Wenlock Priory in Shropshire in the late 1960s.

Film-maker Yael Melamede presents a fascinating, if inevitably slightly indulgent, account of the revered Israeli designer’s life and work

Architect turned film-maker Yael Melamede presents us with this insightful, though perhaps faintly indulgent, portrait of her mother, Israeli architect Ada Karmi-Melamede. With her brother Ram Karmi, Karmi-Melamede designed the supreme court of Israel building in Jerusalem in the early 90s, and then had a brilliant solo practice, creating Ben Gurion Airport.

Karmi-Melamede’s ethos is to establish buildings that take root in their allotted space, an “architecture of the ground and of the sky” – rather than replicate the endless glass towers of first-world cities which could be put down anywhere. Another witty maxim of hers is: “The cheapest building material is the light.” She aimed to do away with her brother’s fashionable brutalism and concrete, a conflict which appears to have resulted in a fascinating dialogue (or possibly conflict) within the supreme court building itself.

Tees Transporter Bridge and a former working men’s club in Barrow-in-Furness among sites at risk of decay or neglect

Teesside’s Transporter Bridge, a disinfecting station in Hackney and a former working men’s club in Barrow-in-Furness have been included on a list ringing alarm bells for Victorian and Edwardian heritage.

The Victorian Society has published its annual top 10 endangered buildings list, intended as a way of drawing national attention to at-risk places in England and Wales.

Built on tar swamps and two tortuous decades in the making, Lacma’s latest addition used twice as much metal as the Eiffel Tower. How did America supersize revered architect Peter Zumthor?

Driving down the palm-lined strip of Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, a striking new crossing heaves into view. A ribbon of glass leaps over the road, sandwiched between two gigantic planes of concrete. As you get closer, the bridge swells out in sinuous arcs, swooping back on itself to inscribe an amoebic, shape-shifting blob, spreading out like an inkblot. From some angles it has a retro-futuristic air, recalling a Jetsons airport terminal, or one of California’s “Googie” style gas stations. From others, the curving roof looks like a great big tongue, flaring out to give the neighbours a raspy lick.

This concrete colossus is home to the new David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), a $724m mothership designed by the fabled Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It is less a museum than a mighty piece of infrastructure, a 110,000 sq ft warehouse-cum-bridge, jacked up nine metres in the air and looming above the street with a brooding, muscular heft. Two decades in the making, and subject to tortuous years of delays, controversies and cost escalations – building on a tar swamp in a seismic zone is not straightforward – it finally opens this weekend.

The Fitzcarraldian feat is the brainchild of Michael Govan, who became Lacma’s director in 2006 with an ambition to build a museum like no other, using the promise of a dazzling structure to lure donations of artworks and dollars ($125m came from LA county, the rest was fundraised). Govan cut his teeth at the Guggenheim, and on Frank Gehry’s Bilbao outpost, where he clearly got a taste for the transformative fairy dust of signature architecture. He later moved to Dia:Beacon, in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he commissioned Zumthor for a project that was ultimately unrealised. At Lacma, he was determined to make a monument for posterity, at any cost.

After two devastating hurricanes, El Yunque national forest has built a new visitors center that hosts a vibrant arts festival